


Breaking of a Mind

by xx R A I B I X (missRISETTExx)



Category: DCU, Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Bad Ending!Au, Cannibalism, M/M, moded!Jaime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-07
Updated: 2013-05-07
Packaged: 2017-12-10 16:32:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/788123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missRISETTExx/pseuds/xx%20R%20A%20I%20B%20I%20X
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As his mind fused with Khaji’Da, Jaime could feel himself slipping away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breaking of a Mind

The breaking of a mind is a slow and painful process. At first it’s small incisions; cuts meant to break him down and change his ways of thinking. Go along with the mission, do as they instruct, but in the end they must not come into the possession of that key. So he took it, did as the Reach instructed, and acted as their perfectly controlled pawn.

Next it was a lobotomy preformed with an ice pick, painful and too fast to stop. It left his psyche screaming. Destroy the team. He had no control. With his mind merging with the scarab, he couldn’t do anything outside of what they commanded. It was a vice grip on his actions, forcing him to take each one of them down, hero by hero, until they all lay collapsed on the ground, bruised and bloody beyond compare.

But there must have been a small part of him that remained in control. The first strike had been against Bart, his best friend over the past few months, and he’d made it quick for him. While he’d been forced to fight against his friends, he didn’t even give the young boy a chance. It was swift, easily done, and although it added to the stress in his mind to harm him, Jaime was glad he didn’t have to see Bart’s face contort in pain, both physically and from the betrayal. If he’d seen that, he would have snapped. Any shred of kindness left in him would have died, withering away into the recesses of his fragile psyche.

Regardless, though, he knew his mind was still slipping away from him. There were moments where Jaime’s thoughts would trail off and he’d have to second guess himself. His reactions and responses were too similar to the scarab. That couldn’t be right. Death and destruction were never his goals, but they’d begun to seem so much more enticing and promising. To kill just one meatbag would bring him pleasure—but no, he had to suppress that feeling. If he could just wait a little longer, maybe the team could still pull together and stop him, just maybe—

No, there was nothing they could do to change the scarab’s enhanced control. Khaji’da was correct; humans were simple and weak. Their eradication or enslavement were the only suitable options.

And so began months of hunting people down, corralling them into cages before throwing them out to work in fields and mines or wherever the Reach might need something harvested. They were the perfect cattle. Working hard to avoid death and punishment, but when the time came that one of them outlived their usefulness, Jaime only needed to press a blade to their necks and they would fall, leaving a pool of the most delightful red blood on the ground beside them. Nothing was more satisfying.

There was one other task assigned to him, though; every hero or metahuman on Earth needed to be stamped out. They were troublesome, trying to stop the Reach in any way they could, and that had to come to an end. One by one, they all fell to him, lying mangled on the ground by the time he was finished. Targets he recognized were always easier to kill somehow and he had their deaths down to a science.

First you immobilized them—take out their ability to move and they are easy targets. Crippled and gasping in pain, they always pleaded for Jaime to come to his senses, to break free of Reach control.

It was pathetic.

But then came his favorite part. Extracting their hearts was like a work of art, but it could be done two ways. If his former self felt some form of affection for the person, he was slow and meticulous, carving out their hearts in a delicate way. He ensured it was still painful, reveling in the sight of their twisted expressions of pain, but they were never horrible mangled by the end of his procedure.

Then there was the alternative method, for those he never cared for. His blade would penetrate them, in and out, in and out, until their hearts were nothing but splintered pieces on the end of his weapon. However, the process wasn’t important, as each heart ended up the same way. Swallowed, sliding down his gullet as he consumed the people he’d known so long ago. They were always a part of him in the past, after all; why just leave their corpses to rot away?

But then there was Bart, the young speedster he’d always held affection for. Though they’d always just been friends, Jaime knew where his own feelings had lied. Love was powerful. It could make you crazy and even now Jaime knew that was what it was doing.

His legs were broken. Bart was like a bird, fragile with clipped wings, unable to leave the nest as he lay there dying. It was beautifully tragic. In the back of Jaime’s mind he felt some remorse, but this was how the Reach did things. No heroes. They all had to die and unfortunately teenage love didn’t change that fact. And so, Jaime began his ritual, though he went about it so slowly, so gently, that it almost made him regret his choice.

His armored hand cupped Bart’s cheek, stroking it softly as he looked down into tear filled eyes. Then he leaned in. Their lips were pressed together for only a moment, the movements nearly mechanical on Jaime’s part, while Bart lay unresponsive below him. The boy could hardly breathe, his body falling into a state of shock from the damage inflicted upon him.

“I love you, Bart.”

And then he began, digging the sharp blade into Bart’s chest and cutting a perfect opening to his heart. This one would be special. This entire moment would be a memory engraved in his mind until the end of time. Bart didn’t make a sound, the life drained from his being as Jaime continued to cut into him, sawing through flesh and bone as he made his way to the heart. It sat so perfectly within the boy that he almost felt bad removing it, but he needed it. He needed to taste that beautiful organ on his tongue, to allow the blood to slip down his throat as he consumed Bart entirely.

But even as the heart entered him, Jaime felt as though the event was incomplete. Bart was important. Bart wasn’t just another body to be thrown away. Jaime loved Bart. Jaime needed Bart to be with him through the surrounding apocalypse. Only then would he ever be content with his existence.

And so the blade went to work once more, this time dragging across Bart’s neck, creating an angry horizontal line in its wake. It was difficult to cut, but eventually the head lay severed from the body, ready for Jaime to grab hold of and lift it off the ground. The briefest of smiles reached his lips and he brought the face closer to his own as his lips brushed against the cold, dead pair.

“Together forever—The Jaime Reyes would be pleased.”

The infusion of their minds was complete.


End file.
